Moving Day — Join Me at Dante's Woods

Dear Subscriber,

We've been here at Wretched Success for several years now. I want to thank you for coming to this spot, this Blogspot. For several reasons I've decided to move the blog over to Wordpress.com. For one, I've been working with Wordpress in several different blogs quite a bit over the last few months. I appreciate its versatility, the data it provides, and the ease of editing. For another reason, it will join with the other blogs I write for and work with. That makes it easier to manage all of them.

Most of the heavy lifting has already been done. All the posts have been moved and everything is ready. All it lacks . . . is you!

So join me at Dante's Woods right away. Here's the link: http://danteswoods.wordpress.com

See you there!

Shared Governance? What Governance?

As the Washington Adventist University campus prepares for Graduation weekend there remains among faculty, students, and alumni a palpable sense of distrust in the statements released by the university on the loss of accreditation by the Nursing Department, the reasons for the laying off of four full-time faculty, and the financial state of the university.

So it’s interesting to note that Washington Adventist University was the subject of a dissertation, A Qualitative Assessment of the Meaning of Shared Governance at a Parochial University (2012) by Shaton Monique Glover-Alves, a doctoral candidate in education at Northeastern University in Boston. The author gathered data through surveys and interviews with administrators, faculty leaders, and even a student leader, to determine the meaning of shared governance on campus. Not surprisingly, she discovered that it had different meanings to various groups on campus, but that the diversity of perceptions could lead to misunderstandings and miscommunication. While the official statements in the bylaws and regulations defined shared governance, the actual practices in interactions between faculty and administration often diverged widely from the required processes.

When asked to define ‘shared governance’ both administrators and faculty leaders interviewed said ‘it all depends.’ This led the author to coin the term ‘situational shared governance,’ meaning that while there were official descriptions of the role of shared governance on campus, the changing situation often dictated how that was interpreted. In other words, due process was often not followed.

The faculty interviewed all said that the many committees on campus had a ‘voice but not a vote,’ that they functioned merely in an advisory capacity, and that their recommendations were often vetoed by the administration. Committees appeared to make a decision, but the real decisions were made elsewhere at another level. Administrators readily agreed that this was the case and one interviewee, referred to as ‘Shane’ (described as the chairman of the Board of Trustees), took care to reiterate that faculty did not have a vote in major decisions.

Faculty have served on search committees in which they spend countless hours recruiting candidates for positions on campus, vetting them, conducting extensive interviews with them, and then making their recommendations on the best candidate, only to have the President summarily appoint someone else. Their disappointment and frustration suggests that in practice, at least, they have a different perspective on their role as a search committee than does the President. One example of this was the appointment by the President of a person to develop a program in Homeland Security. Neither the program nor the position nor the instructor went through any faculty committee or Academic Council. As it enters into its third year on the budget at an estimated cost of over $100,000 per year, the program still has no students. While it was touted as a full four-year degree it is currently advertised as a six-month certificate training program.

The researcher noted that “When faced with questions and definitions about collegiality, “Paul” [a pseudonym for one of the administrators] reported that the governance structure supported the collegial model, and that faculty, staff and cabinet got together to engage in the strategic planning process to discuss mission, vision, and goals. Both Frank and Holly [pseudonyms for top-level administrators] describe collegiality in terms of faculty power and reported that faculty committees only had advisory power, but the administrator had veto power (71).”

The response given by “Paul” is a non-answer. It is a demonstration of his mastery of the sidestep in which the goal is diversion. However, the researcher was not fooled.

Trust was the second major theme that emerged in the study. There was a strong emotional connotation to the idea of trust among the faculty interviewees. The researcher described an interview in which a faculty leader struggled to control his tears as he talked about the humiliation he experienced in actions taken by administrators. Trust was equated with transparency about financial matters, academic decisions, and the goals and visions for the university. While benevolence, competency, and reliability were highly desired by the faculty interviewed, none of those dimensions mattered without trust.

“Paul" noted that “trust takes a long time.” Other administrators talked of “deferred trust” and “delayed trust.”  While some of the faculty interviewed felt that they were trusted to do their job by the administrators, they still had deep reservations about the consistency of care exhibited by administration. In a carefully nuanced statement the author commented, “Researcher reflection suggested that without the formation of a relationship, and a sensitivity to the corresponding emotions, there would be little basis for the success of situational shared governance.”

So when President Spence insists that he operates from a position of shared governance, he means something quite different from what faculty actually experience. He thinks if committees gather, discuss, and talk about an issue that shared governance has taken place. He is then free to disregard or veto the committee’s recommendations. Thus, faculty and administration operate with decidedly different expectations and goals about shared governance. The result is miscommunication, misunderstanding, and constant inefficiency.

The author offers three recommendations:

1. Campus leaders should assess the level of trust in the leader. “There may be a need to build trust before shared governance can be fully effective.”
2. It is wise to periodically "review all documents that describe shared governance to bring them into greater reality with practices on campus."
3. Campus leaders should "engage in discussions on shared governance to clarify campus meanings before embarking on project which require shared governance."

The research was done to discover the meaning of “shared governance” at a religiously-based university. It resulted in more questions about the nature of Seventh-day Adventist higher education. The dissertation concludes with this sentence: "If the institution is academic, then shared governance will flourish; if it is not, then market-driven, corporative, non-input and handed-down decision will be the order of the day.”

The provost and the president have made it clear in videos, written statements, and public forums that their decisions are market-driven, data-based, and handed down. They have consistently resisted input from faculty and alumni and have couched their language in corporative terms. If we take the findings of this research seriously we can only conclude that shared governance, however defined, no longer flourishes at Washington Adventist University.

A Community of Compassion

Where conventional education deals with abstract and impersonal facts and theories, an education shaped by Christian spirituality draws us toward incarnate and personal truth.” — Parker Palmer, To Know As We Are Known, 14

I have always found the phrase, ‘the real world,’ both perplexing and damnable. It is perplexing because of all the worlds we may think we inhabit there is none more real than the one we all live and move and have our being in. And before the phone lines light up—yes, caller, I am aware of metaphors and analogies and similes. Still, the force with which those three words are usually hurled at someone—“Wait until you have to survive in the real world, then you’ll see!”— suggests the hurler believes the reality of this world transcends figures of speech. 

The phrase is damnable because it cordons off a group of people, usually students, and then condemns them for being isolated from the world. The students I teach are well acquainted with the real world. Many of them hold two jobs, take a full load of classes, and care for a child. Some of them play sports in and out of state, while maintaining their classes and work. All of them know the depths of disappointment in striving oneself to weariness and still falling short of goals and expectations. So it is not a phrase I use on students in particular nor most people in general. 

There’s no question that we are in the world; the real question is how we are to be in the world. For Christian teachers and students this is the central question they must answer every day.

Recently, I’ve had reason to question what the advantages of an Adventist Christian college education might be for a young person over one in a ‘secular’ college or university. This is a recurring question for me, a kind of diagnostic to be run in those times when the church as the body of Christ seems pocked with disease, to say nothing of being blind and lame. 

It’s not in the buildings, the landscaping, the amenities, or the sports fields. Most North American Adventist colleges were built near the turn of the 19th century and cannot keep pace with state or even private college campus facilities. On the other hand, I’ve taught on a campus where some buildings pre-date the war—the First World War—and yet students and faculty cheerfully go about their days working around the charm of an infrastructure that was new not long after Oscar Wilde was released from the Reading Gaol. 

It’s not in the endowments, the gifts outright, or the scholarships. Nor is it in the tuition rates, the sports teams, the residential halls, or the food service. 

It’s not in the research facilities, the government and military contracts that bring in millions, nor in graduate assistantships and grants. Most Adventist college professors are too busy teaching four or five classes each semester, plus working on committees, and engaging in service to the college, the church, and the community, to do any research except that directly related to the teaching of their disciplines. 

And it’s not even in the ‘star’ quality of the faculty, although many of the Adventist college professors I know could walk into any college classroom—from community college to Ivy League—and teach as well, if not better, than current professors. 

Where it differs, sometimes dramatically, is in what Parker Palmer calls “a living and evolving community of creativity and compassion.” He goes on to say, “Education of this sort means more than teaching the facts and learning the reasons so we can manipulate life toward our ends. It means being drawn into personal responsiveness and accountability to each other and the world of which we are a part (To Know as  We Are Known).” 

That kind of community, one that draws in students, faculty, staff, and administration, takes time and nurture and care. It develops when the community weathers financial crises together, when difficult decisions about people, programs, and purposes must be made. It can only develop when there is trust and trustworthiness. And if it is formed in the crucible of hard times, it survives because “truth is not a concept that ‘works’ but an incarnation that lives. The ‘Word’ our knowledge seeks is not a verbal construct but a reality in history and the flesh (Palmer, 14).” 

A community like that will not lack talent and expertise in its teachers. They are guided every day by the overwhelming desire to see their students become ‘thinkers and not mere reflectors of other men’s thoughts.’ 

But a community like that is built up over time. It is not the result of data sets, market relevancy, or alignment with fleeting strategies. It comes about when people sacrifice for the purpose, gladly and well, because they know they are in this together. 

If, as a leader, you should find yourself fortunate enough to belong to such a community, walk modestly and listen well. It can all be torn away in a day. 

An Education in Transcendence

“An education in transcendence prepares us to see beyond appearances into the hidden realities of life—beyond facts into truth, beyond self-interest into compassion, beyond our flagging energies and nagging despairs into the love required to renew the community of creation.” — Parker Palmer, To Know As We Are Known

That we are alone in this world is a fact which is confirmed by movies, reality shows, advertising, and economic self-help theories. That this is, in fact, false is something we must learn. 

I don’t mean alone in merely a physical or social sense. I once had a colleague, a recent arrival from China, who went to a public gathering on the 4th of July in Baltimore and felt a sense of panic because she was in a crowd numbering only a few thousand. It’s all in what you’re used to apparently. 

This kind of aloneness is not that of the weary commuter on the train gazing without seeing as the stations blur past. Not even Philip Seymour Hoffman, dying on the floor of his bathroom, a needle stuck in his arm, was alone in the way we are told is the norm.   

This kind of aloneness is deeply American, although other cultures are sensing its allure. It’s a strand of ideological DNA which causes moral palsy in some: the hand outstretched to help twitches, the cup of cold water crashes to the floor.

We are taught to be unique at an early age. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in an essay entitled “Self-Reliance,” drummed the message in with eloquence and fervor: “Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.” And, “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” And again: “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.”

There is something thrilling in these lines, and in many others that Emerson writes. He hated the mob, the unthinking crowd so easily swayed by demagogues and charlatans. He wanted people to think for themselves, to see themselves as individuals. 

What the nation needed in 1841, he thought, was a sense of the present, not the past. Europe was the past: for all its intellectual glories it could not be the template for America. The country needed to build itself from the ground up and the way to do it was to boldly go where no nation had gone before. A nation of individuals, each one pursuing his or her course with a sturdy vigor, was the ideal. 

But somewhere along the way that centrifugal honesty snapped its line and arced away. What we see now is not Emerson’s neighborly self-reliance, but what Parker Palmer calls an endless power struggle between the self and the world. Each self is convinced it is in a battle for survival, with dominance over the world the only possible goal. 

Palmer has been a teacher for decades, a Quaker by choice, and a thoughtful critic of an educational system that trains people for arrogance rather than service. 

He suggests that our hunger for knowledge arises from two sources: curiosity and control. Curiosity for its own sake is amoral, a need to know that shrugs off any restraint. Control “is simply another word for power.” Together, curiosity and control can generate knowledge that leads us toward death, not life. 

But there is another kind of knowledge that contains just as many facts and theories as the knowledge we now possess, but that springs from something other than mere curiosity and control. “A knowledge born of compassion aims not at exploiting and manipulating creation but at reconciling the world to itself (To Know as We Are Known 8).”

This is not a sentimental warm fuzzy kind of love, he notes, but a tough love—“the connective tissue of reality”—and we find it most often in community. 

Palmer talks about “community” a great deal, a word that splays out in so many directions these days that it’s hard to grasp what it means. I can sense that it’s a good thing, though, and as spiritual qualities go, it tops any wish list I could draw up. I’m just not sure how it comes about.

Palmer ties it to transcendence, a word often misunderstood. We need to think of transcendence as not being drawn up and out of life to an eternal realm, but as a sideways impulse, a breaking in of the Spirit which breathes hope and trust into us. That’s the kind of transcendence which happens in community, a practical notion of love with its feet on the ground and its heart aflame with Jesus incarnate—God among us.

I get a much clearer sense of what ‘community’ can mean when Palmer speaks of a “discipline of mutual encouragement and mutual testing, keeping me both hopeful and honest about the love that seeks me, the love I seek to be (To Know as We Are Known 18).”

At Sligo I have found community in the study group I belong to, Believers and Doubters. For years we have prayed together, argued together, studied the Bible and books about it together, laughed and suffered together, and suffered the loss of members together. I would not trade it for anything. It has been an “education in transcendence.” 

What's In a Name?

“Just tell the Oneida crowd we know how excruciatingly painful it must be to have to hear “Hail to the Redskins!” but are confident they have the moxie and the manhood to deal with it.” — Pat Buchanan

Every once in awhile I deliberately move myself out of my well-traveled paths that lead to the Old Testament prophets, the Gospels, the ancient Greek philosophers, Hume, Kant, Mill, Isaiah Berlin, and Monty Python, and check in with current conservative commentators and pundits like Patrick Buchanan and W. James Antle III. 

Since the books I read, the people I talk to, and the viewpoints I consider tend to reinforce what I already believe it only seems fair that I should listen to the arguments of those whose views I shun. I shun these views because I think the people who hold them are wrong-headed and I would rather spend my time considering ideas that I believe I can use. But I’ve also spent a good deal of my life encouraging students to listen carefully, think diligently, and talk responsibly. There are conversations going on all around me that can test these resolves; it remains for me to practice what I preach. 

If a name offends a minority of people should it be changed? The Washington Bullets changed their name in the 80s when the city was known as the murder capital of the country. The owner, Abe Pollin, didn’t want to reinforce the image of violence that plagued the city in those days. Of course, as soon as the name was changed to the Wizards there were grumblings from conservative Christians about witchcraft and sorcery. The change of name was definitely for the better, but it brought no magic to the team’s win-loss record.  

The Washington Redskins first played as the Boston Braves in 1932. The owner, George Preston Marshall, changed the name to the Boston Redskins in 1933, and when the team moved to Washington, DC in 1937 they kept the name but changed the city. Along with the Kansas City Chiefs, the Atlanta Braves, and a handful of college sports teams, these names have drawn criticism for decades. 

In the case of the Redskins, team owners from George Marshall to Jack Kent Cooke have resolutely refused to change the name. Dan Snyder, the current owner, is even more adamant. In a letter to USA Today, May 2013, Snyder said, “NEVER—you can put that in caps.” 

Pat Buchanan, former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and one-time presidential candidate, wrote a column mocking Oneida Indian Nation leader Ray Halbritter, who said in a letter to Snyder, “Native Americans do not want their people to be hurt by such painful epithets.”

Buchanan thought this was both absurd and intolerant on the part of Halbritter and his supporters. He quoted an unnamed source who admired the Native Americans because they fought bravely, stood their ground, and didn’t whine when they were attacked by Europeans bent on taking their lands and killing them off. Naming a football team or any team after Indians, said Buchanan, shows real respect for these proud people. Halbritter should suck it up and realize that we mean no harm—it’s actually a compliment. 

Furthermore, where would the censuring stop? If Halbritter took offense at Snyder’s intransigence what should be done about Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence which called Native Americans “merciless Indian Savages”? 

Should the statue of General William Tecumseh Sherman be pulled down because he wrote to Ulysses S. Grant calling for the extermination of all Indians—men, women, and children? 

Should the face of Teddy Roosevelt be blasted off Mt. Rushmore for disputing Sherman’s opinion that the only good Indian is a dead one? T. R. was more sensitive than that: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”

Buchanan’s argument followed a familiar tactic of reversing the charges: if Halbritter accused Snyder of disrespecting Native Americans he himself should show some tolerance and respect. I’m sorry you took offense; I meant no harm. 

W. James Antle III, writing in The National Interest, took a different line. He argued that polls taken over the years do not show a majority of those polled in favor of changing the name. He admitted that institutions should sometimes “change even cherished customs and traditions out of respect for others.” But that would require, he said, “mutual respect, a desire to let other communities keep what is important to them without powerful reasons to the contrary.” There aren’t enough powerful reasons as yet, according to Antle. We must keep the fundamental difference clear between doing what is right and “doing something at the behest of the politically and culturally powerful.”

So who has the power here? The Native Americans’ request to cease and desist with offensive names are overruled because a majority of people polled don’t think it’s important. Yet, if the Native Americans got their way that would be bowing to the whims of the politically and culturally powerful. 

Have some patience, says Antle. Chill out. Perhaps the tide of public opinion will shift in your favor some day. 

More likely, he concludes, the activists will wear everyone down with their incessant complaining, and the important people, the ones who have important things to worry about, will decide it’s not worth the bother.  What a shame that would be, giving in to such pressure. 

Buchanan and Antle and those who buy these specious arguments believe that these matters are too trivial for serious consideration. They cling to their stereotypes, formed in their youth, in which the cowboys and Indians fought across their Sunday TV screens—and the cowboys always won. To admit that Native Americans have the right to be treated like any other self-respecting ethnic, religious, sexual or racial group would be to grant them power which they don’t deserve. After all, we won and they lost. 

It’s a Catch-22: teams adopt these names because they admire the toughness of the Indians in fending off genocide, but if the Indians complain they are wimping out and betraying their noble heritage. The team owners won’t listen to them because they lack power, but if they were to get power they would be uppity. The harmony of the Union demands that such groups be kept in their place.

Let us restate the obvious: people like Buchanan and Antle have the right to speak their minds. They get paid good money to do so. Those who wish to believe them can line up and pay the admission price for the show under the big tent. But times change and so do ideas and values. They may yet realize they were on the wrong side of history, but by then they will be as anachronistic as cowboys-and-Indians westerns. 

Being Justin Bieber

“I don’t know who I am, But you know life is for learning.” — Joni Mitchell, Woodstock

I’ve been thinking about Justin Bieber this week, about him racing his Lamborghini up a street in Miami Beach, about him telling the arresting officer that he had been drinking and smoking weed, about him cursing the cop as he was being patted down for weapons, about him smiling as he was photographed at the jail, about him making bail after eight hours in jail, and about him emerging from the police station into a forest of mics and thickets of reporters and clutches of fans. How fortunate he is, I thought, he has been blessed with a stutter-step out of his routine; he now has time to regard himself. 

The ancient Romans had a shrine to the goddess Fortuna. She was often depicted with a cornucopia spilling out with all good things, or an orb of sovereignty delicately balanced between her thumb and forefinger. Most who worshipped her also knew to fear her because she was fickle and capricious: she would shower gifts on a person and just as cruelly withdraw them to enjoy her subject’s misery.  

Cicero, Roman orator and statesman, invoked her as the symbol of the ceaseless rise and fall of people and empires, and Seneca’s play Agamemnon had a chorus which chants, “Whatever Fortune has raised on high/she lifts but to bring low.”

Seneca and Cicero might kindly advise Justin Bieber to place his trust elsewhere than in the hands of his publicity agent, his lawyers, and his handlers. 

The media, today’s equivalent of Fortuna, raised him up to glory and will now exact its price in blood. There is no pain so deep that CNN and E! cannot make a ratings killing from it. The incident will be examined in excruciating detail, legal experts will be called in, maps will be drawn and bystanders interviewed. The judge will make a statement, the arresting officer will be grilled at length with questions like, “What was going through your mind as Justin Bieber was cussing you out?” And so forth. 

It’s all entertainment, all of it, from the racing to the display of the arrest report to the coverage of Bieber’s release to his inevitable statement afterward. There’s nothing in this whole incident— or any others which may follow — that cannot be commodified, wrung dry for its glitter and grunge, or spun off into auxillary revenue. 

In 1985, Josh Meyrowitz, professor of communication at the University of New Hampshire, published No Sense of Place:The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. The book won an award in 1986 from the National Broadcasting Association for its insights on television’s power to influence our social roles. Meyrowitz wrote that television is the ‘secret exposing’ machine in society that gives us unprecedented views behind the scenes. What once occurred behind doors or beyond carefully guarded physical boundaries is now exposed for all to see. Meyrowitz argued that the roles we play and witness in our lives are now played out to audiences who are not physically present to us in arenas that do not exist in time and space. In other words, electronic media has made actors of all of us and we are always on stage. 

“Truly different behaviors require truly distinct situations,” he says. We react in predictable ways because we associate certain behaviors with certain physical and social situations. But our ability to accept each other in specific roles relies on our unawareness of that person in other roles. For example, a young woman might be uncomfortable undressing in front of a doctor whom she recognizes as a boy who had a crush on her in high school. “By selectively exposing ourselves to events and other people, we control the flow of our actions and emotions,” says Meyrowitz. “Compassion, empathy, and even ethics may be much more situationally bound than we often care to think.” 

The focus of his research was on television’s ability to break down the walls between actors and audiences and to influence the roles we play in our everyday lives. This was in 1985—two years after Sony introduced the first camcorder, a hand-held movie camera that could record film on inexpensive video cassettes. By 1987 JVC had produced a camcorder with broadcast-quality performance. Less than 20 years after the book was published most people carry smartphones that can shoot high-quality stills and video. More than 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, 80% of it from outside the US. Governments have toppled, politicians have been ousted, marriages dissolved, and cats elevated to cultural icons—all because everything we do can be seen by millions in minutes. 

“All the world’s a stage,’ said Shakespeare, “and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts . . .” 

I can’t help thinking that Justin Bieber, like Kanye West, is a brand rather than a person; that no matter what the occasion or the incident—whether it be carefully scripted or emotionally fraught—it’s all footage for the audience, the beast that must be fed. The fact that both Bieber and West occasionally lash out at the paparazzi only increases the suspicion that they are trapped in a cage of their own making. 

Bieber may not yet be fully aware that his life is not his own, that everything he does is on camera for all the world to see and judge. He is a money-making machine, 24/7, with no time off for good behavior. At times he seems both bewildered and bored, yet he compulsively tweets his most solitary and lonely moments. 

Joshua Meyrowitz thought that what children had formerly learned at a later stage from parents, older siblings, or books, was now available for the taking from television without preparation or preamble. Television had changed our sense of place and space; all backstage behavior was now onstage. Similarly, the ever-present cameras not only give us almost immediate access to situations and their behaviors, but “They give us, instead, new events and new behaviors.”

We don’t know whether to be titillated or embarrassed by behaviors we see on YouTube and television. Through such constant surveillance we are creating situations for ourselves that we have no experience interpreting. But the more awkward the situation the greater the selling point, until we are caught in an escalating rush toward a jaw-dropper such as Miley Cyrus twerking at the VMAs.

Life presents us with countless opportunities to learn, but if we are floating on the surface of our experiences we may not even be conscious of them as anything but a succession of moments. Only as we step back, reflect, and see ourselves can we learn from our changes. It’s a lesson Justin Bieber could learn too, but I’m not hopeful he can see it. 

Exemplary

“Throughout history the exemplary teacher has never been just an instructor in a subject; he is nearly always its living advertisement.” — Michael Dirda, Book by Book

I leapt at this phrase when I first read it in Dirda’s spry little ‘commonplace’ notebook.  It fit my Puritan work ethic and it assuaged the residual guilt that plagues most teachers. This could be the answer to that recurrent nightmare, the one where we are exposed by our students as imposters, pipelines simply carrying the information, subject to any crank that wants to interrupt the flow with a question.
  

Of course, the analogy to the teacher as advertisement is not without its problems. Advertisements are there solely to sell us stuff that we don’t want and certainly don’t need. Advertisements lie—that is their modus operandi—and they are almost always flogging trivial stuff like mouthwash, Doritos, and Lincoln Navigators. Advertisements clog the airwaves, occupy every visible surface, and reduce the wisdom of the world to slogans. Teachers are not advertisements. 

But there’s another way to regard this. Years ago cultural critic and media theorist James W. Carey wrote a seminal essay in which he distinguished two historical views on communication. One was the transmission model in which communication functions to loft messages long distances and exercise power over others from afar. It works well when we text message our friends or fire a missile or take out an ad in the Washington Post. It is at work when we channel the textbook in our classes or lecture without regard for where the shells we lob are landing. 

The other form of communication is ancient; it predates literacy and springs from the impulse to commune with others. It gathers in rather than disseminates, pulls us into a circle of stories around the fire instead of blasting the masses, and works from the inside to the outside. Symbolic, ritualized, it is the way a society defines, maintains, and sustains itself. It is thought embedded in action, the Word made flesh. The message is not simply carried in the shell of the advertisement: it is rather—to ruffle McLuhan’s hair—the message as the medium.

Thus, when we imagine ourselves professing before our classes, do we see ourselves as these exemplary sages who at the very least convey an enthusiasm for the subject that can enthrall even the back rows? Probably not, and rightly so.

The best teachers among us wear the mantle lightly. They seem innocent of it, as unconscious as breathing. When complimented they may be startled or slightly embarrassed or just a bit uncomfortable. This hints at the idea that teaching well is not a technique (from tekhne, ‘art or craft’) applied from the outside but the result over time of allowing our natural curiosity to partner with our desire for communion with others.  When we tell the stories around our particular fires with enthusiasm (from en theos, ‘in god’), we transcend our egos if only for a moment. We lose the weight of being ‘the teacher’ and we truly ‘profess’ what we know and love. 

This “innocence” is not something we can strive for, however. It arrives unannounced, a blessed byproduct of knowledge, love for the subject, familiarity with the process, and experience in handling groups of students.  In those moments we become the embodiment of what we say, a living word. On a cold Monday morning we can be so lucky.